Saturday 10th February Having slept surprisingly well on the bamboo mat in the oma I was nonetheless awake before dawn, excited to hear my first bilou. If I was lucky I might even glimpse one in the distance! I stood outside the porch, the rough boards scraping against my skin, and soaked in the early morning atmosphere. As the sun slowly rose I heard various birds, but no bilou. I strained my ears slightly, hoping to pick out some distant whooping, but there was nothing to be heard. Patience is a virtue when nature watching, but with the time pressure of 'They only sing at dawn' looming over me this was tough. Finally I was forced to bring to mind the other great lesson of looking for animals in the wild: 'Most of the time you will fail'. For some reason nature has often deemed remedial lessons in this area to be of great importance in my studies..... Eventually Sulei emerged. 'Morning Josh, did you hear them?' 'Nope' 'Ah, I thought you wouldn't' I invite the keen thread follower to cast their eye back to previous posts to see how consistent Sulei has been on this point. Needless to say, this moment had the feeling of a real inflection point in the trip. If I couldn't even hear them in the surrounding forest on a quiet and still morning what were the chances that I'd actually find and see one? I put this to Sulei and he promised that if we didn't find any today we would get up even earlier tomorrow morning and walk until we were far enough away from human habitation to have a much better shot at them. I was unconvinced but there wasn't really anything I could do. Despite the whole project having been cast into doubt by the events of the morning, I was feeling rather sanguine. After all, I was in the middle of the forest on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, living with people who had a surprisingly take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the benefits of agriculture over hunting and gathering. I really wasn't going to complain. Spirits were raised higher by breakfast; if we hadn't been there it would just have been more sagu but in order to appease my western palate Ogei worked up some pancakes with fruits and chocolate sauce (the banana pancake trail really does have its tendrils everywhere). At this point I produced what turned out to be a bit of a trump card: some Oats So Simple sachets in various flavours. These were a bit like manna from heaven and my five day supply quickly evaporated. Everyone agreed them to be mananam. (Of all the words I learned that week this has stuck with me the most. There's just something about the way you can throw yourself into it: 'MMMMMMmananam!, to indicate gusto and appreciation. The other option is the evergreen makan bagus, literally 'eat good' in bahasa) Whilst Sulei devised a plan to rustle up some bilou, Amatoplei took me into the jungle for loincloth making. Although it was never explicitly mentioned, this must have been a part of the ethnotourism experience. I'm not not going to dwell on the ethics of it here, but I think people should before they avail themselves of this kind of thing. I was lucky in that it turned out that Sahrul's business relies on family connections, and so the potential for exploitation is lowered, but this was essentially luck; it would have been very hard for me to make that determination when getting off the ferry in Maillepet. Often in indigenous areas it can be quite hard to support local people, I am thinking in particular of China where hotels are typically Han-owned even in 'Autonomous' minority areas. Anyway, Amatoplei and I went wondering through his personal patch of jungle until he found a sapling of the right size and species. He then felled this and we dragged it to a pebble beach by the stream. With a combination of knocking and cutting he removed a strip of bark that went the entire length of the tree. This was then further split into its inner and outer layers, and it was the tough but pliable inner part that we were after. Back at the oma this was 'tenderised' with a mallet which caused it to soften and display a sort of 'cross-hatched' fibrous texture. A really marvellous material. Whilst this was happening it began to pour with rain and so we were confined to the oma for most of the middle hours of the day. When it rains here it really rains. As we sat and watched the river rise and the ground somehow become even boggier I took the chance to ask Amatoplei a few questions. He told me that he doesn't know hold old he is, just that he has 8 children and that this is his third house in the same spot (because it's so wet, even the hard rainforest wood rots eventually. This probably, according to the group, puts him somewhere around the age of fifty. I also discovered something rather wonderful about Mentawai names. You might have already spotted the similarity between his name and his wife Baitoplei's. It turns out that Toplei is the name of their firstborn, a daughter who is now married elsewhere. When Mentawai have their first child they change their names to 'Father of...' and 'Mother of...', and without being patronising I just think that's quite sweet. Thanks to the rain, and I believe the family's social status due to Amatoplei being a shaman, as the morning drew on we gathered more and more visitors sheltering in the porch. We sat and smoked and chatted in Mentawai (I only did the first of these things). To pass the time I got them to translate some of the simple bahasa words I knew into Mentawai, and I also showed the kids my bird and mammal books. These soon attracted the attention of the entire gathering, who are obviously intensely knowledgeable about local wildlife. Sadly this didn't produce any useful intelligence about primate locating. Eventually I busied myself with IDing the various skulls tucked away in the rafters of the oma. Unfortunately one of the guests had arrived to fetch Amatoplei; he was needed for some kind of emergency exorcism and had to leave after lunch. I was sad to see him go, but at least he stayed for lunch, which was a large green pigeon, Treron capelli, that had been shot in the morning, one of the only birds I saw around the oma. I learned many things on this trip, but one of the more surprising was to have a degree of scepticism for the story that we like to tell that indigenous peoples are the custodians of the landscapes they live. That they are key stakeholders can't be denied, but the idea that there is some kind of inherent respect for balance and harmony in nature that will prevent over-hunting does not survive contact with reality. Or perhaps better to say it doesn't survive contact with modern weapons. In the afternoon Sulei announced that we would be trekking to a known joja (langur) roost to see them come back at dusk. He didn't know if we would see any bilou, but there was always a chance. Ogei and the two older boys, Sabei and Matai would be coming with us. Smelling something of a rat, I had a quiet chat with Sulei. Would we be shooting these joja this evening? “Oh yes, but don't worry, you can look at them first, then we will shoot them”. Ah. As you can imagine, this put me in a very difficult position. I was staying in their home, but they were undertaking this trip specifically because I wanted to see primates, and I wasn't really sure I could have the deaths of endangered langurs on my conscience. Eventually I decided it simply wasn't possible, and told Sulei that if that was to be the case I would just have to respectfully cancel the trip. To his credit, Sulei was very understanding, and we entered a period of negotiations. Sulei floated the idea of not shooting the specific langurs in their roost, but I still had visions of bilou plummeting to the forest floor in front of me. In the end we agreed that no primates would be shot today, but that birds would be fair game. Have you spotted the key mistake I made here? We set out at 3.00 pm, with the rapid equatorial dusk being around five thirty. This was my first time off Mentawai paths and onto Mentawai trails. The key difference here is that the trails are mostly just stream beds, and we were sharing them with the streams. My boots, which had finally dried out after yesterday's walk, were instantly soaked, along with my trousers. Active stream beds are both rocky and wet, and wet rocks are slippery. I like to walk with my phone camera to hand for photographing insects or just general scenery (my zoom camera is in a pocket so that I can fumble madly for it if I see something in the distance), and so I was constantly choosing between smashing my screen or an elbow. Our route soon led uphill, and that meant one thing: waterfalls. Sabei knows the forest best, and so our only option was to follow him, but his routes, which I am genuinely sure were in good faith his best estimation of what was safest for me, often led through the most torrential parts of the falls (which were not really that big). I flatter myself to be both a decent rock-climber and relatively strong and fit, but I was really struggling here. Occasionally the trail would cut across 'dry' land a little way, or the jungle would simply encroach onto the streambed, and this presented additional challenges. The first and most obvious were the vines that are thick with thorns. If you are imagining brambles, don't. These are nothing like them. The density of spikes has to be seen to be believed. Next is something that Sulei just referred to as the 'fireleaf'. It was made very clear to me that I didn't want to touch this plant. Sometimes one of the lads would slash at various stems or branches that poked out into our path and sometimes hordes of ants would come gushing out, presumably to engulf me if I got too close. As a general rule, if a branch looked at all necessary as a handhold in my quest to avoid a short, sharp drop Sulei would say 'Don't touch this'. And so we made our way uphill. The low point of my interaction with the flora of Siberut came when I sat down to rest on a tree trunk that had fallen across a small waterfall and the entire thing just snapped off despite being thicker than me. As we made our way through the undergrowth, either stealthily or surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes and profanity, we would periodically stop when one of the boys spotted a bird, just as we had the day before with Ogei. I never saw any of these birds, but I did finally realise my big mistake: if we fired off a gun every twenty minutes on our walk how much nature could we really expect to stay in the area. Well, so it turned out to be. We didn't see any joja at the so-called roost, although we did spot an Asian pied hornbill from the top of a ridge. This turned out to be both the literal and metaphorical high point of the walk, as with night setting in we headed back, thankfully on a different route that took us away from the waterfalls. When we reached a flat stretch I was finally allowed to take the lead. I promptly walked straight into the end of a eye socket-sized branch that punched the lens right out of my glasses. Miraculously there was no further damage to either them or me, and once the lens was retrieved we made our way back to the oma without further incident.
Sunday 11th February We rose much earlier than on the previous day, just the four of us, and set off in the surprisingly cold darkness. Happily we were without guns today, although reasoning that the bilou weren't necessarily to know this I wasn't optimistic. My boots were still soaked from yesterday's excursion, and my clothes still inexplicably wet despite hanging up under the roof for the last 24 hours. This humidity is brutal. Also, in a piece of foreshadowing that will matter later, despite being otherwise excellent hosts, no-one from among the Mentawai felt obliged to explain to me what I was doing wrong with my laundry arrangements. We walked for a long time this morning, and really the only significant animal encounter was with a few aggressive leeches who pulled off their usual trick of getting firmly attached before I noticed them (if you've never been bitten by a leech it doesn't hurt at all until you try to get them off, at which point the analgesic they produce inexplicably stops working.). Whilst climbing a slope we did hear some joja calling quite clearly, but it was in the middle distance and there was no chance of seeing them. We found a spot that wasn't at all eastward facing to enjoy the sunrise and crouched down to listen, with low expectations. After some time, Ogei and Sulei claimed they could hear gibbonsong far, far away, but if I heard it wasn't distinct enough for me to actually identify what it was. I note that in my diary I recorded this as 'counting', but looking back I don't consider this valid at all. So barring some fairly miraculous chance sighting on the long way back to civilization it looked like I wouldn't be meeting my goal for the trip. The walk back for breakfast was a little downcast. The main part of the morning was spent harvesting sagu. Since Amatoplei was absent, the work fell to Baitoplei, Sabei and Xilei (the latter two being the oldest children still at home, both in their teens). We found a large palm and they set to work. First Sabei used a chainsaw to cut the bark off the outside of the tree, as far up as he could reach. Then it was felled using the aforementioned saw, an axe and the ubiquitous machete. Whilst this was going on Matai, the middle boy, was cutting down saplings with his own machete for practice. Once the palm was down you could see inside and it was amazing how porous and uniform the interior was. Not 'soft' exactly, but really different to a hardwood tree. Our team cut and split off the bottom three foot into huge chunks, and then with the use of a strap made from the same material as my loincloth (ossap?), we carried these on our backs to a little house in a separate clearing where they were left to dry. The house is raised on legs partly to keep the pigs away from the sagu, as they eat it raw quite happily. Indeed, we had gathered a small following who feasted happily and noisily on some smaller chunks we threw to them. In order to protect the rest of the huge sagu we had just felled from the depredations of the pigs, a barricade of vicious thorns was constructed across the open end of it. All the materials for this were cut from the forest around us, and the whole thing was thrown up in no time. The ability of the Mentawai to use the natural materials around them is totally unsurprising, but at the same time still hugely impressive. Once this was done we relocated to another sagu, presumably recently felled, removed the existing barricade and repeated the whole process. Finally we took some of the sagu that had already been in the drying house back to the main oma for the women to grind it into a powder before cooking. A musical tangent: as we worked and wended our way through the forest (I was insisting on going barefoot at this point which meant I was in constant peril of being left behind), it was both bizarre and joyful to hear the strains of Despacito drifting through the trees from Mentawai voices both old and young. Clearly, a hit is a hit! After a final lunch (sagu) and photos with the family we started off on our trek back to Madobak. I was really sorry to leave, as despite the absence of bilou the oma and surrounding forest at Atabai had become a place of calm and happiness for me. Our party now consisted of myself, Sulei, Ogei and as an addition Xilei, who would be visiting her boyfriend in town. As we walked and climbed Sulei regaled us with a rather risque story about a local man who had been 'seeing' two women, and who had finally been caught out in more ways than one by a thunderstorm. This produced uproarious laughter from two thirds of the audience and polite but confused smiles from the remainder. By going barefoot through the swamp I had finally cracked the puzzle of having relatively dry boots for the climb itself, and coupled with a much more modest pace compared to two days previously I reached the top in a much better state. As we happily trudged along the ridge it started to pitter-patter, but soon turned just to patter-pattering and worse. We began our literal descent and my own personal metaphorical descent simultaneously. Because it's just a walking trail, the steep downward sections are mainly marked by tree roots serving as natural steplike features. As the rain got heavier and heavier, it got harder and harder to see through my glasses. In particular gauging the gap between one root and another was tricky. As my vision decreased further, it began to feel like I was walking through a hallucinogenic trance, or even that I was in some sylvan version of Munsch's classic, The Scream. Obviously, the physical effect of the rain on the bare earth did not help either. When we got to the bottom of the climb Ogei, fearing that the heavy rainfall over the past few days would have rendered the path we had come up on borderline impassable, decided to take us a different way, which coincidentally went past his house. Mud may be slippery, but it has nothing on what transpired to be the path ahead.: a solid kilometre (this is not an exaggeration*) of gently sloping smooth rock with water streaming down it. Actually, there were footholds cut into the rock, but they might as well have been lined with Teflon for all the good they did me. I tried walking, but immediately fell on my arse. I tried sliding, but picked up speed so rapidly that I got genuinely scared and tried walking again. Rinse and repeat. Naturally Ogei and Sulei were having no such problems, and so were free to provide verbal responses. Every time I fell Sulei would say 'Be careful', and Ogei would say 'You okay mate?' This eventually grated, and despite my best efforts finally elicited a 'good-natured' request from me to stop. At the end of the green mile I was dismayed to find that we had to go uphill again; another negative with this alternative route. We eventually arrived at Ogei's home and rested there for a while. When we got up and left it turned out that actually Ogei lives not particularly near to Sulei at all... Back at the part of Madobak that Sulei lives in I was pleased to find Lionel and Sahrul unlacing their boots; they had also had a good few days. Sahrul looked suitably displeased that we hadn't seen any bilou. To add insult to injury, in the village he had taken Lionel to there had been a juvenile joja kept in a cage in one of the oma. I did at least get to see pictures of this. Lionel promised to email me the pictures when he was back to a world with a good internet connection, but sadly he never did. During dinner with Sulei and his wife, the mild toothache I had been nursing really kicked in and I had to ask Sulei to make me a toothpick (bamboo + machete = easy). I had a good dig and I was absolutely shocked at how much meat I was able to pull out from between my molars. Clearly the pork and chicken I'd been eating over the last few days was far tougher, and with more sinew, than I was used to. Getting rid of this was a huge and instant relief. With night having fallen long before I retired to my berth on Sahrul's roof and let my tiredness take me away. *obviously this is an exaggeration
Monday 12th February 2018 Over breakfast with Sahrul, I did a bit of a post-mortem on the nature watching part of the trip. I asked him if there were better places for wildlife watching than this part of the island. In particular I was interested in Peleonan Forest, which had come up a few times online as a place that surveys had found all of the endemic primates. Sahrul did think that that would have been a better bet, because, and I quote, 'the locals there don't eat monkeys'. However, he also cautioned that that particular patch of forest used to be protected by a group of French researchers, but they had left because there had been too much conflict with locals over access to the land. So it's now unclear how much one would find there. It's also in a totally different part of the island; you need to get off the ferry at the north and then take a four hour motorcanoe. I didn't have the time or the money to do this. Perhaps the information will be of use to someone else reading this (or even myself in the future). I wandered around the village a bit, taking in the atmosphere before we set off back to Muntei. I met a couple of guys who invited me back to their house for tea. In due course I found that the house belongs to one of them, Genjing, who is local. The other, Boraja, was from Medan and had fled a financial career in the city to reconnect with life on a simpler level. Fascinatingly, he told me that he used to be a Muslim but converted to Christianity. This is the kind of thing I thought was heavily frowned upon and is one of the reasons that I love travelling; you always meet people who defy your preconceptions of what is happening elsewhere in the world. Genjing's house is huge and mostly unfinished. When I asked Sulai about this he sort of rolled his eyes; there is probably a whole other story to be told there. Whilst we are near the topic of religion I found being woken by the call to prayer to be far more egregious today than I had before I had spent three days in the forest. I mentioned this to Sahrul and he just smiled sadly and said 'This is Indonesia'. Eventually we loaded up the bikes and got ready to set off. Because it is typically fine in the mornings and rainy after lunch we were expecting a much better journey. We stopped at Ogei's house again; I hadn't realised, but the children who were running around us yesterday are actually his sister's. Ogei became their sole carer after her death. He is much younger than me but shoulders so much responsibility, and can literally carve a living out of the forest around him. Back on the road we soon came to a destroyed bridge. I will let the picture speak for itself but I know that it was totally fine when we crossed it on Thursday. Apart from this the ride went much better and we stopped for a cup of tea at a little roadside store about two thirds of the way back. The owner was wearing a t-shirt that said 'Everyday I'm shuffling!' I thought this was absolutely hilarious, and tried to tell her why, but with my extremely limited bahasa vocabulary all I was able to do was point at her chest and say bagus! (good!). I probably didn't help things by then saying 'You know, shuffling!' and essentially jiggling my own chest at her. It was only afterwards that I realised how this might have been interpreted, and it's still a bit of a mystery how I didn't cause any offence. I like to think that after I left there was a very interesting discussion about cultural difference. We got back to Sahrul's brother-in-law's house, just beating a massive rain storm. Whilst we all sheltered inside (including the chickens), everyone else got down to the business of chopping penang. (imagine if you will a sort of smooth walnut on steroids). Unfortunately the method to get them out of the shell involved chopping down with a machete from height, with the nut braced in your fingers. This is a motor skill that I simply don't have, and I figured that attempting to acquire it at this point would probably come at the cost of at least two digits! After the rain stopped I tried to do a bit of bird watching along the track, but I didn't find very much. The track itself was nice enough though and it was good to get some alone time after being with other people almost continuously for five days. When I got back it was almost dinner time. One thing that I struggled with on this trip is that as a guest I am expected to finish all food on the table. When Sulai was full he would simply gesture to me to continue, and seemed quite concerned if I protested that I was also stuffed. I tried taking a portion at the start of the meal and sticking to that, but it still seemed I should be finishing the communal plates as well. With four meals of sagu a day, and banana pancakes on top of that, I am sure I gained weight on the trip. I went to sleep knowing that on the morrow I would be getting on the ferry back to Padang having not seen a single primate on Mentawai. However, despite this dismal failure there was reason to be cheerful. The future was both horny and hairy...... (This poster sits on the wall in Sulai's house)
Tuesday 13th February 2018 I had a challenging start to the day as I went to the bathroom at 5 a.m. and discovered the largest spider I've seen outside a zoo sat next to the bowl. Sadly waiting was really not an option and we had to share the space. I think he may have had the more scarring experience... Disappointment over the lack of bilou seen in the last week hung like a cloud on me that morning, more so than previous days. I decided to go for a morning run along the road to shake the blues, which turned out to be a good decision. I got a fantastic view of the early morning sky over an orchard at the far point of my route and by the time I was back at the oma things were looking much rosier. We rode back to the port on the bikes with Sulai and Ogei, but there were still several hours before the ferry left. They said they were happy to wait with the bags so I went for a stroll around town, which I hadn't really gotten to see on arrival. It's a funny old place. The main street hugs the shoreline, but much of it is mangrove rather than beach and so stilt houses have been built over the mud, providing an arresting view. Needless to say, most of these houses look pretty new as it's hard to imagine them faring particularly well in a tsunami. Boxing Day 2004 may feel like a long time ago to us, but on Siberut both direct and indirect effects can still be seen. Having exhausted the possibilities of the town itself I wandered up a hill into some light wood- and shrub-land, and happened across a little open-ended hut. It seemed like a good place to stop and take in the world and so I perched for a while and managed to finally spot a few interesting birds, including Van Hasselt's Sunbird. I then headed back towards the ferry terminal and on my way past a garage I noticed a couple of familiar looking backs bent over a motorcycle. It was Ogei and Sulai. “I thought you were watching my bag” “Oh yes, we were” I decided against further chatting and luckily found all of my gear intact and present by the ferry. (In case anyone is wondering what the problem with the bike was, it had broken down on the way back from Madobak yesterday and the only way we could get it going again was to remove a large spring) Eventually the ferry arrived and we hopped on board. Sadly it was a different boat without a top deck. If you haven't travelled in SE Asia before I suggest you picture a long and floating coffin. In the event of an accident there is really no chance most people would get out. Implausibly we made it back to Padang without incident and I checked back into the guesthouse by the harbour. I now had 11 days to make it overland to Jakarta where a flight was waiting to carry me out of the country. The question was, had I banked enough bad fortune so far to be able to try for something really ambitious in the forests of Sumatera Selatan when Lady Luck swung back my way? Perhaps a tiger snacking on a striped rabbit? Or should I just play it safe and visit Way Kambas in the hopes of seeing Haripan? ----- If I had visited the Mentawai Islands a generation earlier I believe I wouldn't have seen any villages in the interior. If you the reader follow in my footsteps a generation later you may not find anyone living in the forest. I fear that like me you may not see any bilou living there either. But my greatest fear of all is that there may simply be no forest there for the Mentawai and bilou to live in. The world outside Europe and the West is changing so fast, in Indonesia perhaps all the more so. And when you think about this story and the road building crew pushing their way inwards from the coast, and the plantations that will inevitably follow, spare a thought for Ogei and Sulai. They don't want the change that is coming either, but I wonder what they would give to have access to the hospital that would probably have saved the lives of their sisters.
Spiders like that are really common at night in the forest, especially on boardwalks. I have no idea if they are venomous enough to affect humans, and they certainly aren't aggressive at all, but they give me the heeby-jeebies. I'll always remember one time on a trail in Taman Negara catching a reflection in the torch-beam and realising that all around me spiders like these were descending from the canopy on silk threads.
I have uploaded an extra tranche of photos: those that didn't fit into a particular day's write-up, but were still interesting. Do check them out. (note the distinct lack of live gibbons) https://www.zoochat.com/community/media/albums/mentawai-islands-2018.21/
